The Lasting Impact of the Iran-Iraq War
                               
Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish Tribune 

This coming Sept. 22 marks the date, in 1980, when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran.

Taking advantage of the political turmoil in his much larger neighbour following the downfall of Iran’s Shah and his replacement by Ayatollah Khomeini’s theocratic regime, the Iraqi dictator thought he could score a quick victory and grab the oil rich, Arab-majority province of Khuzestan.
Instead, the struggle became a war of attrition that lasted eight years – it became the longest conventional conflict of the twentieth century – and cost hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides.

Oil production was affected as each country targeted the other’s oil terminals. Both nations also attacked oil tankers and merchant ships in the Persian Gulf, including those of neutral nations, in an effort to deprive the opponent of trade.

Although the war terminated in a military stalemate on Aug. 20, 1988 – Khomeini said he “drank the cup of poison” when he accepted a truce mediated by the United Nations – Iran was the effective victor, having withstood the Iraqi aggression with far less modern weaponry than Iraq possessed.

Iran also had fought without any allies, while Iraq was supported financially by the Arab Gulf states and Saudi Arabia, was supplied with arms by the Soviet Union, and even received covert help from the United States.

As we know, Saddam went on to defeat in the 1991 Gulf War, after having conquered Kuwait, and was finally eliminated altogether by the American invasion of 2003.

Iran, on the other hand, despite Khomeini’s death in 1989 and some internal opposition in recent years, has gone from strength to strength, geopolitically.

Today, ironically, the post-Saddam Iraqi government, led by prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, who is, like the Iranians, a Shi’a Muslim, has become quite close to Tehran. (Saddam’s Ba’ath Party regime was Sunni-dominated and oppressed the country’s Shi’a majority.)

The even more radical Shi’a cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose Mahdi Army commands the loyalty of followers in the poorer areas of Baghdad and in the country’s south, is believed to have spent part of the last four years studying to be an ayatollah in Iran.

For these reasons, some analysts call Iran the true beneficiary of the American defeat of Saddam.

Iran has also extended its influence in the Arab world, particularly in Lebanon – where Hezbollah is its political proxy – and Syria.

When Iran’s foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, at the end of August called on the government in Damascus to recognize its people’s “legitimate” demands, this probably had more effect on Bashar al-Assad than anything Washington says.

But Salehi also warned NATO against any temptation to intervene in Syria. “Syria is the front-runner in Middle Eastern resistance” to Israel and NATO “cannot intimidate this country with an attack.” Tehran still considers Assad’s survival a key strategic goal. Iran relies on Syria to help facilitate arming and financing Hezbollah as well as Hamas.

And despite denials by current president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran is clearly in the process of developing a nuclear capability, and makes no bones about threatening to wipe Israel off the map.

“Recognizing the Palestinian state is not the last goal. It is only one step forward towards liberating the whole of Palestine,” Ahmadinejad told worshippers at Tehran University on Aug. 26, ‘International al-Quds Day,’ according to The Jerusalem Post.

In August 1979, Khomeini declared the liberation of Jerusalem (al-Quds in Arabic) a religious duty to all Muslims.

In language reminiscent of Nazi rhetoric, Ahmadinejad declared that “the Zionist regime is a centre of microbes, a cancer cell and if it exists in one iota of Palestine it will mobilize again and hurt everyone.”

Three decades after the start of the Middle East’s longest and deadliest 20th century war, Iran has definitely become a major regional power.

Iran is a Regional Power in the Middle East

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

Despite some internal opposition in recent years, the theocratic regime in Iran, founded by the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, has gone from strength to strength, geopolitically One of its main enemies, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, is no more, defeated by the American invasion in 2003. The post-Saddam Iraqi government, led by prime minister Nouri al-Maliki , who is, like the Iranians, a Shi’a Muslim, has become quite close to Tehran.

Iran has also extended its influence elsewhere in the Arab world, particularly in Lebanon – where Hezbollah is its political proxy – and Syria.

When Iran’s foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, at the end of August called on the government in Damascus to recognize its people’s “legitimate” demands, this probably had more effect on Bashar al-Assad than anything Washington says.

But Salehi also warned NATO against any temptation to intervene in Syria. “Syria is the front-runner in Middle Eastern resistance” to Israel, so NATO should not be allowed to “intimidate this country with an attack.”

Tehran still considers Assad’s survival a key strategic goal. Iran relies on Syria to help facilitate arming and financing Hezbollah as well as Hamas in Gaza.

And despite denials by current president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran is clearly in the process of developing a nuclear capability. Indeed, the country is taking advantage of the unrest in the Arab world, which is distracting the international community, to accelerate its efforts.

In June, Iran unveiled underground silos that would make its missiles less vulnerable to attack. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has expressed “increasing concerns” about research by Iranian scientists on nuclear warhead design.

Tehran also makes no bones about threatening to wipe Israel off the map. Ahmadinejad told worshippers at Tehran University on August 26 that “The Zionist regime is a center of microbes, a cancer cell and if it exists in one iota of Palestine it will mobilize again and hurt everyone.”

Israel is a very small state, little more than 22,000 square kilometres in area. And to compound the problem, over 70 per cent of its population, and its ports, airports, refining capacities and industry are located along the coastal plain, 260 kilometres long from north to south and some 17 kilometres deep. One nuclear weapon could destroy most of the country.

Iran is aware that, if it attacked Israel, the Israelis, who have many nuclear weapons, would counter-attack, observes political analyst Hirsh Goodman, of Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, in his new book The Anatomy of Israel’s Survival.

“But with a population 10 times that of Israel and a country 75 times as large, Iran reckons that no matter how harsh the punishment meted out in return for attacking Israel, it would be mauled, not killed.”

A nuclear Iran, it is now recognized, “is not Israel’s problem alone,” writes Goodman. “It possesses missiles that bring the Gulf states, Egypt, Turkey, Europe and Russia all within reach. A nuclear Iran would be transformative, a country not easily gone to war against, and one that will have considerably more power on the regional stage.”

Indeed, Turkey announced earlier this month that it would install a new radar system designed by the United States. It came as Ankara has become more critical of Iran due to Tehran’s continued support of the Syrian government.

Iran has become a power to be reckoned with.

Three Down, Two to Go? Apparently Not

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

There are five Arab countries along the Mediterranean in North Africa: Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, known collectively as the Maghreb.

In three of them, dictators have effectively been eliminated. Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Hosni Mubarak, and now Moammar Gadhafi, are history.

However, rulers in Algeria and Morocco, both former French possessions, are hanging on.

Algeria, a huge state that borders Libya and Tunisia to its east, has had a particularly violent history. From 1954 to 1962, the National Liberation Front (FLN) fought a war against the country’s French overlords, gaining independence after the deaths of as many as one million people.

As well, about one million European settlers, the so-called pied-noirs, of mostly French descent, who accounted for some 10 percent of the population, fled to France.

The FLN proclaimed a socialist state, the People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria, and the country’s first president was the FLN leader Ahmed Ben Bella. He was overthrown by his defence minister, Houari Boumédienne, in 1965.

Boumédienne turned the country into a military dictatorship, allowing the FLN to effectively wither away. After his death in 1978, his successor, another officer, Chadli Bendjedid, took over as president.

By the early 1990s there was massive unrest in Algeria, so Bendjedid allowed the formation of political parties, and scheduled elections for 1991. However, when it became clear that the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), founded two years earlier, was poised to win, the army mounted a coup and cancelled the elections.

A civil war followed in which between 160,000 and 200,000 people were killed over the next decade.

Abdelaziz Bouteflika, in office since 1999, continued repressive emergency rule. However, in January opposition parties, unions, and human rights organisations, inspired by events in neighbouring Tunisia, began to spearhead popular demonstrations against the regime.

Forced to accommodate their demands, Bouteflika lifted political restrictions in February. He also announced new measures to create jobs.

While sporadic opposition to the regime continues to flare up, at the moment no serious challenge to the government seems to be in the offing.

The ancient kingdom of Morocco, divided between and ruled as a protectorate by France and Spain between 1912 and 1956, has been far more stable than Algeria.

The Alaouite dynasty, which has ruled Morocco since the seventeenth century,traces its ancestry back to the Muslim prophet Muhammad, and so has far more legitimacy than most Arab rulers.

The current king, Muhammad VI, who ascended to the throne in 1999, has strengthened the economy and improved Morocco’s human rights record. Still, in February thousands of Moroccans rallied in the capital, Rabat, to demand that he give up some of his powers.

In June, the king announced a series of constitutional reforms, giving the country’s prime minister and parliament more executive authority. Elections are now scheduled for November.

While some protests have continued, organized by the February 20 Movement, this seems to have satisfied most Moroccans.

For the moment, therefore, the revolutions that have toppled other autocrats in the Arab world have bypassed these two nations.

Tribal Revenge a Worry in Post-Gadhafi Libya

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

If a man is known by the company he keeps, it doesn’t say much for Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, who will apparently allow his new best friend, Moammar Gadhafi, to seek asylum in his country.

I suspect even Chávez’s other comrade, Fidel Castro, is embarrassed.

After an inconclusive six months of battle, the opposition in Libya is finally on the verge of defeating the mad tyrant of Tripoli.

But now the real work will begin.

Libya is little more than a notional state.

Most people’s loyalty is first and foremost to their own tribal group. Many Libyans have traditionally relied on tribal connections more than civil society for justice and security.

In recent weeks, anti-Gadhafi insurgents in Libya’s western mountains and around Misrata have attacked civilians whose tribes supported Colonel Gadhafi, looting mountain villages and emptying a civilian neighbourhood.

The city of Yafran, southwest of Tripoli, has become the easternmost outpost of a cultural and linguistic reawakening of the Amazigh, the Berber people long oppressed by the Gadhafi regime.

Amazigh cultural and political leaders have framed a set of public demands for a post-Gadhafi Libya.

As part of their vision, their native language, Tamazight, will have an equal standing with Arabic.

But at the same time, the houses in Yafran of the Mashaashia, a tribe whose members supported the Gadhafi dictatorship, were burned.

There were similar reports of arson against the tribe in other towns in the region.

As well, General Abdul Fattah Younes, one of the commanders of the opposition forces, was murdered by some rebels, apparently in revenge for his previous role as Gadhafi’s security chief.

In response, the head of his tribe, the Obeidi, threatened to retaliate against those responsible, setting off a crisis in the opposition’s ranks.

Members of the tribes close to Colonel Gadhafi, such as his own tribe, the Qaddafa, or the larger Maghraha, may face the greatest danger from “tribal revenge,” George Joffe, a specialist on North African politics at Cambridge University, told the New York Times.

Reprisals have been a source of embarrassment for the Transitional National Council, the de facto rebel authority, but with much of Libya close to anarchy, there is little they can do about it.

Meanwhile in Syria, another dictator fights to hold on to power.

Will Bashar al-Assad be the next to go?

It’s going to get crowded in Caracas.

Woodstock and America, Then and Now


Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Most people have at some time heard these lyrics, from the Crosby, Stills, Nash &Young song “Woodstock”:

“By the time we got to Woodstock, we were half a million strong,
And everywhere there was song and celebration.”

The year was 1969, of course. It was one of the highs – Americans walked on the moon – and lows – the war in Vietnam was dividing the country.

The three-day concert, which has become an iconic event in the history of the 1960s, was held at Max Yasgur’s 240-hectare dairy farm near the little town of White Lake, New York, in the Catskill Mountains, from August 15 to August 18.

I was in the Catskills earlier this month, in the town of Woodstock. It has long been a gathering place for artists, musicians, and writers, even before the music festival – which was actually held some 65 kilometres away -- made the name famous. (It was originally to be held in Woodstock itself but the venue there proved too small.)

Yet how different America seems four decades later. The hippies and flower children -- now in their sixties! -- have given way to “millennials,” younger people who wonder if they’ll ever have a decent career. The euphoria of the 1960s is now a memory, replaced by economic crisis and paranoia about terrorism.

There’s no need to reiterate the depressing data regarding debt, deficits, and dismal unemployment numbers. Things remain dire and there seems little government nor business can do about it.

Concerns over security have made it almost impossible to walk into many buildings or board airplanes without waiting in lines to be searched. Gone are the days when it was as easy to get onto a plane as to hop on a bus.

In New York City, I spoke to friends and relatives – doctors, professors, real estate agents, journalists -- about America’s woes. All were pessimistic. They were all liberal Democrats, as well, and feared Barack Obama might lose next year’s presidential election to a Republican.

“Woodstock,” it turns out, was in retrospect not “the dawning of the Age of Aquarius,” but a fleeting moment in American history.

Things are not looking good in America. But as my mother once said, at least “New York is New York.”

The State that Gets No Respect

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Later this month I'll be visiting New York and New Jersey.

Everybody loves New York, of course. But New Jersey probably gets more bad press, and endures more ridicule in popular culture, than any other American state.

Who has not at times chuckled at the uncouth accents (think "Joyzee"), cringed while watching movies and television shows about the Mob, or gasped when inhaling the terrible pollution on the Turnpike when driving in the northern part of the state.

Although two National Football League teams, the Giants and the Jets, play in New Jersey's Meadowlands sports complex in East Rutherford, both call themselves New York teams!

The many jokes about the state perpetuate a stereotype of New Jerseyites as classless yahoos.

If Connecticut, which borders New York to the east, is perceived as the home of New England gentility, then New Jersey, on the western side of the Hudson River, is the place where the rough and tumble working class aspires to grab a piece of the American dream.

That's not easy to do these days. Some of the state's cities, such as Newark, Paterson and Trenton, are amongst the poorest in the nation, rife with crime, corruption and all manner of social pathologies. They are urban wastelands.

The state's unemployment rate is close to 10 per cent. Conservative Republican Governor Chris Christie has dealt with the financial crisis by slashing budgets and taking on public sector unions.

But there's another side to the Garden State (which actually has vast farms covered with vegetables and floral products and is also home to Ivy League Princeton University). It is exemplified by people like Bruce Springsteen, the populist singer who voices the frustrations of America's forgotten underclass in songs like "Born to Run" and "Born in the U.S.A."

One of the beach towns along the Atlantic, Asbury Park, is home to the Stone Pony, which was a starting point for many musicians, including Springsteen, his wife Patty Scialfa, and Jon Bon Jovi. It's become something of a pilgrimage site for fans of rock and roll.

"It is a place that is important -- not just to us, but to the world," then New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman said on Memorial Day weekend in 2000.

In 1976 casino gambling was legalized in Atlantic City as a way to restore the fortunes of the famous resort, which had become a rather shabby place, experiencing a long period of economic decline.

Although the city revived considerably after the 1970s, with many new hotels and casinos built - it became the Las Vegas of the east -- the current recession has again hit the city hard. The unemployment rate stands at almost 13 per cent.

Poor New Jersey —- it gets no respect.

Hold 'Em or Fold 'Em?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

Why is it that some countries will invest so much effort and money in hanging on to certain territories but not to others?
 
In the last two decades we have seen examples of this seeming inconsistency in various parts of the world.
 
Ethiopia has managed to hold on to Tigray and the Ogaden, areas with long-standing grievances against the Amhara-dominated state, but allowed Eritrea to secede in 1993.
 
Serbia let Montenegro go its own way in 2006 but fought tooth and nail, unsuccessfully, to maintain its control of Kosovo in 1999, and still refuses to acknowledge Kosovo’s sovereignty.
 
Indonesia has snuffed out separatist uprisings in Aceh and other parts of the archipelago but gave up its attempt to keep East Timor, which became a sovereign state in 2002.
 
Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in 1982 and abandoned Gaza in 2005, while it continues to occupy much of the West Bank.
 
And the Sudan, while refusing to release its genocidal grip on Darfur, finally acceded to the independence of South Sudan this year.
 
Ian Lustick, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, may have an answer to this seeming paradox. In an article published in his co-edited anthology Right-Sizing the State: The Politics of Moving Borders, Lustick tries to explain why states will disengage from some territories, but not others.
 
Lustick suggests that often, a country’s political elite comes to regard a territory as being so integral to the identity of the country, that the area’s status cannot be reduced to a question of interests, costs and benefits.
 
On the other hand, another territory may become seen as a place apart. So leaving it does not alter the state’s very conception of itself.
 
Eritrea, East Timor, and Montenegro had been incorporated into the states that finally let them go for a relatively brief period of time. They had all been separate political entities prior to their annexation and therefore also had well-defined borders. So their departure did not alter the core identities of Ethiopia, Indonesia and Serbia.
 
The Sinai and Gaza have little real ideological significance for a Jewish state. And in the Sudan, the Muslim north had in colonial times been governed separately from the largely animist and Christian south.
 
Darfur, Tigray, and Aceh on the island of Sumatra, however, have been central to the modern politics of the Sudan, Ethiopia, and Indonesia. Losing these territories would be a blow to each country's sense of self-definition.
 
As for Kosovo and the West Bank (the biblical Judea and Samaria), both have tremendous religious-ideological importance for Serbs and Jews.
 
They are considered the respective birthplaces of their nations and are therefore crucial to each country’s national identity, even though other peoples -- Kosovar Albanians and Palestinian Arabs -- over time had become the majority population.
 
In such cases, it becomes a battle of history versus demography. These are among the most difficult political issues to resolve, because they are fraught with emotions that trump all else.

Reshaping the State to Avoid Secession

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

If you can’t reshape a country politically, you may have to resize it.

That, simply put, is the theory posited by Ian Lustick, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, in his co-edited anthology Right-Sizing the State: The Politics of Moving Borders.

What he means is that states unwilling to accommodate demands by ethnic, linguistic or religious minorities, and therefore unable to contain secessionism, may end up smaller than they once were.

In the past few decades, we have observed a number of nations acceding to sub-nationalist or regionalist demands, usually by reshaping themselves into federations or granting the units involved more autonomy.

In Europe, for instance, Spain, Italy and Great Britain are no longer unitary states.

The Spanish constitution, ratified in 1978, granted both Catalonia and Euskadi (the Basque region) their own instruments of self-government. The autonomous communities – more have been added since -- constitute a highly decentralized form of territorial organization, and Madrid hopes this arrangement will help dampen secessionist feelings in the country.

Italy, to counter centrifugal forces, now has 15 regions with limited autonomy and another five with “special” self-rule. They all acquired more powers following a constitutional reform in 2001.

In the United Kingdom, Tony Blair’s Labour government was elected in 1997 with a promise of creating devolved institutions in Scotland and Wales; both now have their own assemblies.

Northern Ireland has even been granted the theoretical right to join the Republic of Ireland, should a majority vote that way in a future referendum. The 1998 Belfast Agreement states that any future change in its status can be brought about by “a majority of the people of Northern Ireland.”

Even France, the epitome of a centralized state, has allowed a measure of autonomy for the Mediterranean island of Corsica, which is now termed a territorial collectivity.

India has reshaped itself numerous times, in order to contain the vast and diverse population within its borders. In 1956, there was a wholesale reorganization of the Indian states along linguistic lines. Since then, many new states have been carved out of existing ones, to satisfy tribal groups and other minorities. The country now has 28 states, along with seven union territories.

African states, largely artificial constructs, have been less successful in meeting demands by regional or ethnic groups, perhaps because there are simply too many such groups to satisfy. Many countries have become failed states as a result and so face eventual downsizing. This has already happened to Ethiopia and the Sudan, as well as to Somalia, which has effectively ceased to exist. Others, such as the Congo and Nigeria, may follow and break apart.

Canada, too, has faced the issue of nationalist discontent, centred in Quebec. The wholesale reshaping of the country under Pierre Trudeau, which gave us official bilingualism and multiculturalism, went far in meeting the demands of francophone Canadians.

However, many Quebec nationalists wanted more autonomy and legislative powers for the province. Attempts to satisfy them through asymmetrical federalism, in the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords, failed, and as a result separatists almost managed to pull the province out of Canada in 1995.

Since then, parliament passed the Clarity Act in 2000, setting out the terms by which any future referendum will be deemed legitimate, and Stephen Harper’s government recognized the Québécois as a nation in 2006. Will this suffice, or is resizing the country, through the departure of Quebec, still in Canada’s future?

The Case for Israel

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

As most people who follow events in the Middle East know, the Jewish state of Israel is under increasing ideological attack by those who wish to delegitimize, and thus eventually eliminate, the country.

They claim that the Jewish people have no right to the territory, but are interlopers and imperialists who stole the land known to these opponents as Palestine.

Yet Jews are one of the most ancient historical nations in the world. And Zionism attaches Jewish “nation-ness” to a specific territory, that of biblical Israel.

But the Zionist movement was about more than just the reclamation of an ancient homeland. It asserted that Jews, like other nations, needed sovereignty in order to survive and not remain helpless victims.

Hitler’s was only the last of many attempts to wipe out Jewish communities in Europe, beginning with the First Crusade at the end of the 11th century, when soldiers on the way to the Holy Land killed Jews in the Rhineland. Jews were perceived as just as much an enemy as Muslims.

In 1648-49, Bogdan Chmielnicki’s peasant army in eastern Europe massacred upwards of 300,000 Jews. And after the First World War, soldiers loyal to Symon Petliura in the Ukraine, murdered from 35,000 to 50,000 Jews in a series of pogroms.

Twentieth century Zionism was thus a form of nationalism, in response to these and other tragedies, in an era of nation-state building. It was no more “racist” than other versions. After all, anyone can, through conversion, become Jewish – even the leader of Hamas.

Whereas in truly segregationist societies, such as the old U.S. South or South Africa, neither Martin Luther King nor Nelson Mandela could have become “white.” These were ascriptive and immutable caste categories based on so-called race theories.

Historically, many Jews, especially on the left, had their own ideological reasons for opposing Zionism. The Jewish Labour Bund, the eastern European Jewish socialist party, had advocated instead its notion of do’ikayt (“here-ness”), which claimed Jews should focus on building viable communities in any place in which they lived.

And that opposition still holds true for some in today’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish sects, who are against it on theological grounds.

But the Second World War demonstrated the weakness of these competing beliefs – 6 million Jews were killed despite the (half-hearted) efforts by the Allied countries to save them. Jews were not the top priority in the war effort.

Despite the claims of many of today’s multiculturalists, it seems likely that, in the long run, national groups can only survive if they have a territorial base. Can Germany depend on Germans who emigrated to the United States, or Poland on Canadians of Polish descent? The same holds true for Jews, who are rapidly assimilating in such countries.

Today, almost half of the world’s Jewish population lives in Israel, where they don’t have to “work” at being Jewish – even if they are totally secular.

As for those who propose a “one-state” solution to the current Israeli-Palestinian confrontation, they should be reminded that such a prospect is highly unlikely.

Anyhow, why not have two states, as was proposed by the United Nations in 1947? The issue of borders acceptable to both sides is a different matter.

No one suggests neighbours Portugal and Spain should unite, or Norway and Sweden.

And those nations are closer in terms of culture, religion, and language to each other than are Israelis and Palestinians, nor have they recently fought each other.

Canada Courts a World Power

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh have declared 2011 the Year of India in Canada.

India has become one of the world’s most powerful nations, politically, militarily and economically.

In 2010, bilateral merchandise trade between Canada and India totalled $4.2 billion, an increase of 73 percent since 2004. Canadian merchandise exports to India increased 142 percent over this period, reaching nearly $2.1 billion in 2010. Two-way direct investment was more than $7 billion. But India remains Canada’s 15th-largest trading partner, and Canada ranks just 33rd on India’s list.

Canada and India have now entered formal discussions for a comprehensive free trade pact that could be worth $6 billion a year. India has also announced plans to locate North America’s first Indian Cultural Centre in Toronto.

This makes perfect sense. About 1 million Canadians of Indian origin live in this country, more than half of them in Toronto, which is home to the largest Hindu temple in Canada.

Toronto also recently became the first North American city to host the “Indian Oscars,” the International Indian Film Academy awards. The awards gala drew an audience of 22,000 in the Rogers Centre, with another 700 million worldwide viewing it on television.

India is now the largest producer of films in the world, and its production centre in Mumbai, formerly Bombay, has given the industry the informal name “Bollywood.”

Also, after China, India has the largest diaspora in the world, estimated at 25 million people, living in countries such as Australia, Britain, Canada, and the United States.

India retains strong links with its diaspora. It even issues Person of Indian Origin cards to people of Indian background living abroad, allowing them, according to the government, “to reconnect with their roots, as well as to respect their desire to participate in the development of the country of their origin.”

As India’s economy continues to strengthen, a growing middle class in the country seeks quality education for their children at the university level, and universities in India can’t keep up with the demand.

So about 160,000 Indian students are enrolled at universities abroad, mainly in Australia and the United States – but only 3,000 are studying in Canada.

Canadian universities are now working hard to recruit more Indian students. Senior Indian and Canadian university leaders and government officials recently attended a Canada-India education summit at Carleton University in Ottawa.

Some Canadian univerisites are also creating joint study or research programs with Indian universities.

York University’s Schulich School of Business plans to build a campus in Hyderabad, and the University of Waterloo is considering doing the same.

What a difference a century makes. In 1911, when India was a colony within the British Empire, King George V and Queen Mary had their durbar in Delhi. A durbar was a mass gathering in Delhi to commemorate the coronation of a British king and queen as emperor and empress of India.

A description of the event noted that Silver medal 1911, British India“The Sovereigns had appeared in their Coronation robes, the King-Emperor wearing the Imperial Crown of India with eight arches, containing six thousand one hundred and seventy exquisitely cut diamonds and covered with sapphires, emeralds and rubies.”

A feature film, titled “With Our King and Queen Through India,” was released a year later. This was the high tide of British imperialism. It must have seemed to those in attendance that it would never end.

Yet, just 36 years later, a near-bankrupt Britain granted India (and Pakistan) their independence. Nothing lasts forever.

In the Company of Microstates, P.E.I. Is a Giant

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Europe is home to five miniscule microstates - these are countries that are geographically extremely small and, with one exception, have populations far less than 100,000.

While the Mediterranean island nation of Malta, a former British colony encompassing 316 square kilometres, has only been an independent country since 1964, the others - Andorra, Liechtenstein, Monaco, and San Marino - have been self-governing jurisdictions for centuries.

San Marino traces its existence back to the late Roman Empire and claims to be the world's oldest republic. Andorra arose out of a 13th-century treaty that created a jurisdiction jointly ruled by a Catalonian bishop and a French count. Monaco also emerged in the 13th century as a Genoan colony under the control of the House of Grimaldi. Liechtenstein had been part of the old Holy Roman Empire and acquired full sovereignty at the beginning of the 19th century.

Andorra, with a territory of 468 square kilometres, is nestled in the Pyrenees Mountains between France and Spain, and Liechtenstein, at 160 square kilometres, is in the Alps between Austria and Switzerland. Monaco, just two square kilometres in size, is surrounded by France, and San Marino, at 61 square kilometres, is an enclave inside Italy.

Compared to these countries, Prince Edward Island, at 2,194 square kilometres, is a giant.

Malta has a population of 410,000, Andorra 85,000, Liechtenstein 36,000, Monaco 35,000, and San Marino 31,000.

(Vatican City in Rome, the home of the Catholic Church, is technically a state and has observer status at the United Nations but it's not a real nation. Iceland and Luxembourg are by some definitions microstates, but they are far larger in area and population than these five countries.)

In the past considered too tiny to be full partners in the international community, these countries were viewed as anomalies, merely the leftover quirks of history.

When the League of Nations was founded after the First World War, none of them joined. And when the successor United Nations was formed in 1945, again none were among the original 51 signatories to its charter.

However, post-war global decolonization resulted in a wave of sovereign microstates, most of them small islands in the Caribbean, Indian Ocean, and South Pacific. Today's Commonwealth (of which Malta is a member) is largely a collection of such countries.

This paradigm shift allowed the European microstates to take their rightful place as full members of the international community.

Today, these tiny entities are all members of the greatly-expanded 192-member United Nations. Andorra and Malta joined in the 1960s, and the very tiny states of Liechtenstein, Monaco, and San Marino in the 1990s.

They participate fully in European affairs. All are members of the Council of Europe and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). They belong to many other international organizations as well.

They conduct bilateral diplomatic relations with many countries around the world. Andorra has five embassies abroad, Liechtenstein six, Monaco nine, San Marino 14, and Malta 23. They also staff numerous consulates and diplomatic missions in various capitals and other cities.

Professor Barry Bartmann, one of our colleagues in the Department of Political Studies at UPEI and a specialist on the politics of microstates, recently interviewed many of their UN-accredited diplomats in New York for a study on their foreign relations.

No longer is size an impediment for countries wishing to make their mark in the world.

Libyan War Could Signal NATO’s Collapse

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

Christopher Hill, a former United States special envoy for Kosovo and now dean of the Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver, has remarked that the NATO operation against Moammar Gadhafi is in danger of failing.

It suffers, he has written, from a “strategy/policy mismatch. The policy is to remove Colonel Gadhafi from power. The strategy – the mandate for the means – is to protect civilians. The latter will not ensure the success of the former.”

His warning echoes that of outgoing U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates, who recently pulled no punches when he told the leaders of the alliance that it faces a “dim” and “dismal” future, if so many of its member states refuse to get involved in the current war against the Libyan dictator.

Gates said that less than half of NATO’s members have participated in the effort, and only one-third have contributed militarily. (Canada is among the one-third involved.) Shortcomings in capability and will, he remarked, “have the potential to jeopardize the alliance’s ability to conduct an integrated, effective and sustained air-sea campaign.”

Not only is Gadhafi continuing to defy the alliance, but had himself photographed playing chess with the visiting Russian head of the World Chess Federation in Tripoli recently.

The U.S. Congress is also tiring of the Libyan campaign and has not hesitated to let President Obama know it.

The House of Representatives last week rejected a bill to authorize continued American military operations in Libya.

This was mostly symbolism, as a measure that would have limited financing to support those efforts failed. It was, however, a warning to the administration.

America is drowning in debt, caused partly by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and there is little appetite for this conflict.

The total cost of American operations in Libya is expected to top $1 billion by the end of the summer.

Barack Obama doesn’t want to throw his weight around the way George W. Bush did.

But the Libyan mess actually illustrates the shortcomings of multilateralism and dependence on organizations such as NATO, the Arab League and the UN Security Council itself, which has forced the U.S. and its allies to conduct a campaign with not one, but almost both hands, tied behind their backs.

If the United States, and other willing countries, had attacked Libya’s armed forces, and killed or captured Gadhafi, right at the start (even if this had involved elite ground forces), this war would have been over within weeks, if not days.

Maybe it would have been “illegal” by the standards of international law today, but think of how many lives, buildings, and other infrastructure –  not to mention money – would have been saved.

No “Arab Spring” in Yemen

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

Yemen, the poorest Arab state, with a gross domestic product per capita of little more than $1,000 a year, has descended into political chaos.

Located at the south-western edge of the Arabian peninsula, the present-day Yemeni state was formed in 1990, when the north, an ancient Arab kingdom and then a republic, united with the south, the former British colony of Aden and later a Marxist-ruled “people’s democratic republic.”

Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen’s president, who took power in the north in 1978, has ruled the loosely unified Republic of Yemen since its formation.

Yemen’s population, which now stands at more than 24 million, has far outstripped its meagre resources. Much of the country is desert, and its predominantly rural population has a literacy rate barely above 50 percent.

Yemen is a small petroleum producer, but output from the country’s oil fields is falling and they are expected to be depleted by 2017 – a major concern, since oil provides around 90 percent of the country’s exports.

Saleh supported Iraq’s conquest of Kuwait in 1990, alienating not only that emirate but also Saudi Arabia, which was providing critical financial assistance to Yemen. The Saudis, in retaliation, expelled 1 million Yemeni expatriate workers.

Also, endemic civil warfare, mainly various northern tribes and secessionist socialists in the south fighting the central government, has further hampered economic growth. As a consequence, for the past 10 years Yemen has relied heavily on aid from multilateral agencies to sustain its economy.

The northern part of the country is controlled by tribes belonging to the Zaidi stream of Shia Islam; they constitute about 40-45 percent of the country’s population. Sunni Muslims live mainly in the south and southeast.

In 2004, one Zaidi insurgent group in the northwest, the Houthis, launched an uprising against the government. The Yemeni regime accused them of having ties with Shi’ite Iran, and in 2009, the Saudis, fervent Wahhabi Sunnis, intervened on the side of the government, bombing Houthi regions.

Yemen has now also been swept up by the turmoil that has spread across the Arab Middle East.

More than 20,000 anti-government protesters gathered in Sana’a, the capital, for a “day of rage” against President Saleh in early February. They called for immediate regime change and rejected Saleh’s offer to step down in 2013.

They want a transitional government of national unity, composed of technocrats, that will function until new parliamentary and presidential elections can be held. The Houthis announced their support for the pro-democracy protests.

More protests followed throughout March and April, but Saleh stood his ground. However, in May, the powerful Hashid tribal confederation, also composed of Zaidi Shi'ites, joined the fight against the president.

Battles soon ensued in Sana’a, and in early June Saleh was himself severely injured by a bomb, and was flown to Saudi Arabia for treatment. Meanwhile, vice president Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi has assumed power. Many in the opposition movement like him, because he is a southerner and shows no signs of tribal loyalties.

Saleh’s return is uncertain, but he has left behind a failed state which has little prospect for a transition to democracy.

 

Is “Arab Spring” Now Stalled? 

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

As spring gives way to summer, the "Arab Awakening" seems stalled.

While dictators in Egypt and Tunisia were fairly easily removed by pro-democracy forces, the autocrats that have ruled Libya, Syria and Yemen for decades are not going quietly into the night.

Despite months of bombardment by NATO, and the loss of about half the country to opposition forces, Moammar Gadhafi remains defiant in Tripoli, and shows no signs of exiting willingly.

This should come as no surprise to those who have observed this megalomaniac's behaviour over the four decades he has terrorized his people.

Meanwhile, the Assad clan that has been in power in Syria since 1970 is fighting for its life and seems willing to use whatever it takes to stay in power. At least 1,400 protesters have been killed since the uprising began some 12 weeks ago, and thousands more have fled across the border into Turkey.

Jisr al-Shughour, a town of 50,000, became the latest focus of the Syrian government's efforts to crush the rebellion. Security forces sent in tanks and attack helicopters to recapture the town.

The armed forces had already used similar tactics in other cities, and parts of the capital, Damascus.

Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad, took over after his father, Hafez, died in 2000. The Assads have used the Ba'ath Party apparatus to run a tightly-controlled despotic one-party state.

The Assads are members of the Alawi offshoot of Shia Islam, while most Syrians are Sunni Muslims and consider the sect heretical.

In 1982, Hafez al-Assad crushed an uprising in Homs led by Sunni Islamists, killing at least 25,000 people and razing much of the city. Should the regime fall, there would probably be a bloody settling of accounts, so Bashar has little choice but to fight to the death.

Yemen, the poorest Arab state, has descended into political chaos. About half of the population is functionally illiterate, and most Yemenis identify themselves as members of tribes that often battle each other over the scarce resources of the country.

The present-day Yemeni state was formed in 1990, when the north, an ancient Arab kingdom and then a republic, united with the south, the former British colony of Aden and later a Marxist-ruled "people's democratic republic."

President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who had been in power in the north since 1978, has ruled the loosely unified Republic of Yemen since 1990.

The protests in the country started at the end of January, when some 16,000 demonstrators took to the streets in the capital, Sana'a, demanding the end of Saleh's rule.

First he said he would not stand for re-election in 2013 and then he promised he would oversee a "transition" to democracy. This did not satisfy his opponents, who did not trust him to keep his word. They proved to be correct.

But the pro-democracy movement, based largely in urban areas, was overtaken by older divisions within Yemeni society.

Saleh decided to transform the conflict from a protest movement against an autocratic leader into a military conflict between the state and leading tribal rivals, and hoped in this way to remain in power.

At the end of May, he unleashed his guns on the forces of Sadiq al-Ahmar, leader of the powerful Hashed tribal confederation (of which Saleh himself is a member). The Hashed and Bakil, followers of Zaidi Shi'ism, are two large tribal groupings in north Yemen that historically have been important sources of power in the country.

This was a calculated gamble - but it proved to be a mistake. Opposition tribesmen left the mountains for the capital to reinforce Hashed fighters. Soon, intense fighting erupted in Sana'a.

Saleh and several others were injured and at least five people were killed by the June 3 bombing of the presidential compound. Badly wounded, Saleh flew to neighbouring Saudi Arabia for treatment and transferred power temporarily to his vice president, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi.

To add to the turmoil in the country, another group of Zaidi Shi'ites, the Houthis, based in the northwest of the country, have been waging a rebellion against the central government since 2004.

As well, Islamist militants suspected of links to al-Qaida have taken over two towns, including Zinjibar, the capital of Abyan province, in southern Yemen.

Whether he returns or not, Saleh has left a country on the verge of civil war and economic collapse, with a violent power struggle among rival tribes underway. Yemen has become a failed state, and democracy is nowhere on the horizon.

Uprising Highlights Ethnic, Religious Divisions

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

The Assad clan that has ruled Syria since 1970 is fighting for its life and seems willing to use whatever it takes to stay in power.

At least 1,400 protesters have been killed since the uprising began some 12 weeks ago, and many thousands more have fled across the border into Turkey.

Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad, took over after his father, Hafez, died in 2000. The Assads have used the Ba'ath Party apparatus to run a tightly-controlled despotic one-party state.

The Assads are members of the Alawi offshoot of Shia Islam, while most Syrians are Sunni Muslims and consider the sect heretical.

The Alawis were once at the bottom of the ethnic and religious ladder, but began their ascent during the period of French rule in Syria, which lasted from 1920 to 1946.

Profiting from French efforts at divide-and-rule in Syria, they joined the military in disproportionately large numbers.

After independence, chaos reigned in the country, as one coup d'état followed another.

This provided the Alawis with the opportunity to rise to power, by dominating the armed forces and the Ba'ath Party. In 1963, the party took power away from the Sunni majority.

Sunni resentment has never disappeared. In 1982, Hafez al-Assad crushed an uprising in Hama led by Sunni Islamists, killing at least 25,000 people and razing much of the city.

Should the regime fall, there would probably be a bloody settling of accounts, so Bashar has little choice but to fight to the death.

However, Assad is popular among Christians, who make up more than one tenth of the population, and other minorities who fear a change in the country's delicate ethnic and religious balance should a Sunni-majority regime replace him.

Mordechai Kedar, author of Asad in "Search of Legitimacy - Messages and Rhetoric in the Syrian Press 1970-2000," thinks it possible that "six states will rise from the ruins of Syria, each more homogeneous than the former united Syria and more legitimate in the eyes of most of its inhabitants."

Minorities such as the Druze and Kurds might seek independence, and dissident groups in Aleppo and other cities might secede from the Damascus-based country.

Kurds make up about seven percent of the country's population, yet were only recently granted citizenship.

For more than 50 years they have been subjected to an aggressive Arabisation policy, denied the right to speak or be taught in the Kurdish language or to practice Kurdish traditions.

Official positions by governments and movements in the region have taken on a sharply sectarian character.

While the Shiite regime in Iran, the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government, and the Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah have all been silent on the uprising or supportive of Assad, other Middle Eastern states, including neighbouring Turkey, have become increasingly critical of Damascus.

Before the uprising, Turkey had become one of Syria's closest allies, but relations have badly deteriorated.

Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has denounced the repression as savage.

Syria is geographically and historically a pivotal country in the Middle East, and the outcome of the current struggle will have ramifications across the region.

Canadian Jewish Congress Future Uncertain

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

The Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC), the once-proud and venerable “parliament of Canadian Jewry,” has become a shadow of its former self.

Soon it will become just another agency under the aegis of a yet-unnamed organization that will supervise most of the country’s national Jewish organizations.

Originally created in 1919, the CJC soon became moribund. Only with the rise of new threats of fascism and anti-Semitism at home and abroad after 1933, was the Congress again reconstituted.

Congress became a permanent institution, an “umbrella” comprising a large number of affiliated Jewish organizations, and a pinnacle in Canadian Jewish political development. From 1939 to 1962 its national president and most powerful figure was Samuel Bronfman.

In the 1930s, the CJC was concerned mainly with monitoring the rise of various anti-Semitic and pro-fascist movements, and attempting, unsuccessfully, to facilitate the entry into Canada of Jewish refugees escaping Europe.

Following the Second World War, the Congress dealt with the tragedy of the Holocaust, and was focused on lifting the barriers to immigration by the European survivors.

It also welcomed, and provided support for, the new state of Israel.

The “golden age” of Congress was probably between the 1950s and 1970s, when it championed human rights and social justice, and was instrumental in lobbying governments to abolish discriminatory laws in employment, housing, and other impediments to the full participation of Jews in Canadian life.

It also monitored and fought, after much prodding by Holocaust survivors, the resurgence of neo-Nazism in the mid-1960s, and it later applied pressure on the Canadian government to prosecute war criminals living in the country.

At the time, as historian Gerald Tulchinsky has remarked, it “effectively embraced Jewish organizations of nearly all political and social stripes in the country and was recognized as the voice of the entire community.”

By the 1960s, though, Jewish federations were becoming established in the major Jewish centres; they not only provided services and raised funds for domestic and Israel programs, but also assumed direction for community planning.

They solidified their position in the 1970s, as all funding decisions regarding community money came under their control – including the operating budget of Congress.

The federations became the crucial link between Canadian Jews and their governments on matters relating to their communities.

Since Congress had always viewed itself as the focus for community policy-making, its dominant role began to diminish.

So by the turn of the 21st century, the Canadian Jewish Congress was definitely no longer “the only game in town.”

It co-existed, sometimes uneasily, with a number of municipal Federations and other Jewish organizations.

The Canadian Council for Israel and Jewish Advocacy (CIJA), founded in 2004, became the principal advocacy, oversight and co-coordinating body for the Congress, the Canada-Israel Committee, the Quebec-Israel Committee, National Jewish Campus Life, and the University Outreach Committee.

This year the CIJA has formally incorporated these groups, including Congress, to create one advocacy organization.

The new, as yet unnamed, agency “will continue the work of all the agencies that it is succeeding or that are being folded into it, including the whole range of traditional Congress activities,” Shimon Fogel, the CEO of the CIJA, has stated.

Fogel said the Canadian Jewish Congress leaders were involved in the process.

“This isn’t a hostile takeover.”

Maybe not, but the Congress, despite its glorious past, still faces an uncertain future.

The American South Today

Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish-Tribune

Escaping a particularly cold Prince Edward Island  spring, we flew to Tampa, rented a car, and spent two weeks driving along the Gulf of Mexico coast, through the Florida panhandle, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, until we reached New Orleans.

This whole region is part of the American deep South, where 50 years ago, segregation was still the norm, the racist Ku Klux Klan was a power to be reckoned with, and civil rights workers were beaten and even murdered.

On the surface, little of this horrid period of history remains visible. On the highways and in the towns, one sees the same fast food chains, Walmarts and supermarkets as elsewhere in the United States. Blacks and whites now eat and work together.

In Biloxi, Miss., we visited Beauvoir, the last home of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America.

In 1861, 11 of the states where African-Americans were enslaved seceded from the Union. Most American Jews abhorred slavery, though some did serve in the Confederate ranks.

Judah P. Benjamin of Louisiana was appointed Secretary of State of the Confederacy by Davis in 1862.

The southern states were only defeated following one of the most terrible civil wars in history, one that cost 625,000 lives. Finally, in 1865, the Confederacy ceased to exist and slavery was abolished.

But for the next century, the so-called Jim Crow laws kept Blacks segregated in schools, workplaces and neighbourhoods. Few could even vote, much less run for political office.

All that changed after the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King in the 1960s.

A significant number of those trying to bring the South into the 20th century were idealistic young Jews. About 50 per cent of the civil rights attorneys in the South during the 1960s were Jews, as were more than half of the whites who went to Mississippi in 1964 to challenge the Jim Crow Laws.

Two Jewish activists, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, along with one African American, James Chaney, were murdered there by the Ku Klux Klan as a result of their participation.

In the South today, Blacks serve as sheriffs, mayors, state legislators and congressional representatives.

In Biloxi, more people are interested in the casinos that have turned the city into a southern Las Vegas than in the so-called ‘Lost Cause,’ the Confederacy of Jefferson Davis.  

The South does retain a distinctive culture, however. Most of the stations we found on the car radio were devoted either to country music or evangelical religion. 

Last year, Haley Barbour, the governor of Mississippi, had to apologize when he suggested during an interview that the White Citizens’ Councils active in his state during the era of desegregation weren’t “that bad.” 

And in 2002 Trent Lott, a US Senator from the state, was forced to step down as the leader of the Republican Party in that body when he remarked that Strom Thurmond, the arch-segregationist senator from South Carolina, should have won the 1948 presidential election. Thurmond ran as a ‘Dixiecrat’ opposing integration.

“When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him,” said Lott. “We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over the years either.”

Despite such backsliding, the American South, more than at any time since the Civil War, has itself been integrated into the wider political culture of the country.

Swept away by the "Orange Crush"

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

As everyone in Canada now knows, the New Democratic Party won 102 seats in the federal election, and they are now, for the first time in their history, the official Opposition.

But before anyone gets carried away by the “Orange Crush,” let’s “drill down” on this.

Almost 60 of these seats were won in Quebec. But in that province, other than in a few ridings in and around Montreal, no one was actually voting for NDP candidates, or even for the party’s platform and policies.

They were simply voting for “none of the above,” which this time around included the Bloc Québécois as well as the two old-line federalist parties. Most of these are seats where the NDP polled less than 10 percent in past elections.

Remember, this is a party that, until last Monday, had one seat in Quebec! And had never won more than one in any previous federal election.

It’s not as if the party has a loyal base in the province. This was no hard-fought victory. In effect, it was the result of a tidal wave sweeping away the debris of the other parties.

That’s why the caucus now includes university students who have in effect won the lottery – one of them is 19 years old. The sacrificial lambs have escaped their usual fate.

Outside of Quebec, the NDP won 44 seats, which is just an increase of eight over their pre-2011 caucus of 36 from the rest of Canada. This is no big surge.

The NDP is lucky that it now has four years to turn this bunch of “accidental MPs” into a real political machine.

It’s a good thing Jack Layton has a PhD in political science and used to be a university professor. He’ll be giving lectures on Canadian parliamentary procedure.

But remember, the Quebec tail now wags the Canadian dog.

And many of these newly elected members will take Layton at his word when he talked about bringing Quebec back into the Canadian family.

Can anyone spell Meech Lake/Charlottetown?

Quebecers have done this kind of thing before: in 1984 they voted en masse for Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives, ending decades of Liberal Party domination.

By 1990 the Québécois nationalists in the party would doom it to extinction.

In the 1960s, many in the province voted for a weird offshoot of the old right-wing Social Credit Party, which had been western-based under the leadership of Robert Thompson. In 1962, the Quebec wing, known as the Ralliement des créditistes, won 26 seats in Quebec, while only four Social Credit MPs were elected in the rest of Canada.

Under the leadership of Réal Caouette, they were impossible to control and helped destroy the entire party.

Always be careful what you wish for.

Aid Group Failed Wartime Jews

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

This coming Sunday, May 1, is Holocaust Memorial Day, set aside to remember the millions of victims murdered in Hitler’s death camps in the Second World War.

On Prince Edward Island, it has been observed since 1999. This year, the ceremony will be held on Monday, May 2, at Memorial Hall, Confederation Centre of the Arts, Charlottetown, from 6:30 to 9 p.m.

Leo Adler, past director of National Affairs for the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies in Toronto, and the son of Holocaust survivors, will be the speaker.

Many governments failed in their duty to rescue Jews, Roma, and others from death at the hands of the Nazis. But international non-governmental organizations, too, were found wanting.

The failure of the Red Cross to help Jews during the Holocaust is the most shameful episode in its history.

Founded in 1863 to provide aid to military casualties and prisoners of war, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), headquartered in neutral Geneva, Switzerland, by the 20th century faced a new challenge: how to deal with unprotected civilians targeted by totalitarian regimes such as Hitler’s Germany.

In the Second World War, having failed to extend Geneva Convention protections to these new victims of war, it retreated into becoming a cautious and ineffectual organization.

The ICRC opted for a strategy of not addressing the question of Jews directly.

It made only general approaches concerning the victims of mass arrests or deportation, and then it made no reference to their religious affiliation or racial origins, although it was clear that the people in question were, for the most part, Jews.

On April 29, 1942, the German Red Cross informed the ICRC that it would not communicate any information on “non-Aryan” detainees, and asked it to refrain from asking questions about them.

This was accepted by the Geneva headquarters.

Information about the persecution of Jews did, however, filter out of Germany and the German-occupied countries and reached the Allied governments. Some of this information also became known to the ICRC.

Therefore, in the summer of 1942, the ICRC debated whether to launch a general appeal on violations of international humanitarian law.

It prepared a draft, but decided in the end not to issue the appeal, believing that it would not achieve the desired results.

As reports of extermination camps began to spread in 1944, a Swiss ICRC delegate, Dr. Maurice Rossel, visited the Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia at the invitation of the Nazis. His June 23 visit was carefully orchestrated.

He walked through the ghetto under the escort of SS officers, but he did not have the opportunity to talk with the Jewish prisoners there.

The Nazis had cleaned up the ghetto by lessening overcrowded conditions by sending prisoners to Auschwitz and adding a bank, shops and schools.

The ruse worked. Dr. Rossel signed a report approving of the treatment of the Theresienstadt Jews.

On Sept. 27, 1944, Dr. Rossel went to Auschwitz. There he spoke to the commander of the camp, but he was not authorized to go inside it. Again, there was no protest.

In her memoir “The Art of Darkness,” published in 2002, Charlotte Opfermann wrote: “Why was the International Red Cross Commission duped during their so-called inspection of the (Theresienstadt) camp in June 1944? The commission wanted to be misled.”

Ruth Schwertfeger’s 1989 book “Women of Theresienstadt: Voices from a Concentration Camp” contains the following comment made by the survivor Klara Caro:

“It was never clear to me to what extent the so-called commission was in league with the Nazi criminals. If it had been a serious commission who really wanted to investigate our living conditions, then they would have examined more than the façade built for the purpose and would have gone independently into the stables and attics. They on the other hand only saw what the Nazis showed and presented them.”

In his book “The Red Cross and the Holocaust,” published in French in 1988, with an English translation in 1999, Swiss academic Jean-Claude Favez noted that the ICRC’s desire to maintain balance, borne out of its neutral, Swiss orientation, and the habit of reticence among most of its leaders, was no match for the Nazis.

The ICRC in 1996 released copies of its Second World War files, some of which provided verification that it knew of the persecution of Jews in Nazi concentration camps but felt powerless to speak out.

The files, 25,000 microfilmed pages, were turned over to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The Red Cross has long acknowledged its awareness of the treatment of Jews during the Second World War, maintaining that if it had disclosed what it knew, it would have lost its ability to inspect prisoner of war camps on both sides of the front.

This is nothing but rationalization.

The Red Cross stood by while millions of Jews, and others, were murdered in gigantic factories of death.

Should Hawaii Belong to the U. S.?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The so-called “birthers” insist that Barak Obama should not be president of the United States because he was not born on American soil, as required by the U.S. constitution. They may be right—but not in the way they think.

A loosely organized group of conspiracy theorists, right-wing extremists, racists, and religious bigots, these people claim that the president was born in Kenya, or perhaps Indonesia, and is secretly a Muslim.

Of course this is nonsense. Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on Aug. 4, 1961.

But should this archipelago, America’s 50th state, belong to the U.S?

The Hawaiian islands are not offshore, the way Prince Edward Island or Newfoundland are. On the contrary, they are the most isolated inhabited pieces of land in the world: 2,390 miles from California; 3,850 miles from Japan; 4,900 miles from China; and 5,280 miles from the Philippines.

Honolulu is three time zones west of Los Angeles. It takes as much time to fly there from the west coast as it does to get to New York, three times zones to the east.

Puerto Rico in the Caribbean, a U.S. Commonwealth, is much closer to the mainland United States.

Hawaii was an established, ethnically homogenous, Polynesian kingdom. The islands were unified under King Kamehameha I in 1810. King Kamehameha III established the first Hawaiian-language constitution in 1839-1840.

In November 1843, the British and French Governments formally recognized Hawaiian independence. The U.S. followed in 1849, and Japan and Germany afterwards.

But European and American settlers began to meddle in the affairs of the kingdom, and in 1893 the last monarch, Queen Liliuokalani, was deposed in a coup d’état led largely by American businessmen and missionaries.

They were opposed to her attempt to establish a new constitution for the country, one which would have strengthened the power of the monarch relative to the American business elites. Sanford Dole, a member of the family later famous for its pineapple plantations, declared a republic.

The islands were formally annexed by the United States in 1898. It was part of a wave of American expansion that year. The U.S. victory in the Spanish-American War also added the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, and, temporarily, Cuba, to the American empire.

Hawaii became a U.S. territory in 1900 and a state 60 years later. It is the home of the U.S. Seventh Fleet, based in Pearl Harbor, which was attacked by Japan on Dec. 7, 1941, bringing the U.S. into World War II.

A Joint Resolution of the U.S. Congress adopted in 1993, the centenary of the 1893 coup, and signed by President Bill Clinton, “acknowledges that the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii occurred with the active participation of agents and citizens of the United States and further acknowledges that the Native Hawaiian people never directly relinquished to the United States their claims to their inherent sovereignty as a people over their national lands, either through the Kingdom of Hawaii or through a plebiscite or referendum.”

The Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act of 2009, introduced by Senator Daniel Akaka of Hawaii in the U.S. Congress, proposes to establish a process for aboriginal Hawaiians to gain federal recognition similar to an Indian tribe.

There are nationalist movements in the state seeking some form of sovereignty for the islands, which they spell as Hawai‘i (pronounced Havayi, the proper pronunciation in the Polynesian language).

Others would be content with some form of self-government for indigenous Hawaiians, in effect creating a special entity within the state. They want recognition that there is an aboriginal people in Hawaii, one which had formed its own nation prior to annexation.

One group, the Reinstated Hawaiian Kingdom, a few years ago landed on a small island and planted its own flag, symbolically laying claim to the state.

In her recent book Unfamiliar Fishes, about the American takeover of the islands, author Sarah Vowell recalls hearing her tour guide recount the story of when the Hawaiian flag was lowered and the American flag was raised. “It happened more than a hundred years ago, but she was upset about it, as many Hawaiians are,” Vowell said.

Can Hawaiians reclaim their country, or is it too late? Today, native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, at 21 per cent of the state's population, are now a minority in their own homeland. They have been surpassed by Caucasians, Japanese-Americans, and other Asian-Americans.

It would take a lot for an American state to secede from the Union. But proponents of some form of self-determination for native Hawaiians may yet succeed.